Technorati Redesigned – Get Realigned Here

Technorati has pushed a redesigned to their site today and I thought this would be a great time to introduce all our readers to Technorati and walk you through the new and definitely improved site.The first thing I noticed when I visited the new site was a scrolling marquee at the very top that kept displaying one spam/porn link after another and reminded me somewhat of 1995. Apart from that, the new site looks great. There are two different display pages to Technorati depending on whether you are logged into the site or not. While surfing the site without logging in, you are first presented with a quick-view of the most popular content in the three different categories indexed by Technorati: videos, blogs, and music. Right next to this, of course, is the tag cloud displaying the hottest topics of conversation at the moment.The blue tabs you see next to the three categories are clickable, and clicking on them takes you to a longer list of popular content from the category. The longer lists for videos and music display 30 items, and for blogs just redirects to the Technorati 100.The interface is very clean, more streamlined, and easier to browse, with the help of the prominently displayed navigation menu.Clicking on popular works in a similar fashion to just clicking on one of the blue tabs, but for some reason this section drops the music category and focuses on top and most favorited blogs, most searched items on the site, top videos, top movies, and news.Once you log in, the view is completely different and more personalized. In the left margin you have easy access to Technorati WTF, followed by the most popular searches on the site, the top tags, and at the very bottom you have Technorati tools. In the center you have the most recent content from your favorited blogs, followed by the generally most popular content in videos, music, movies, games, dvds, news, and buzz. And in the right margin you have the list of blogs that you have claimed through Technorati.Moving on we have Technorato WTF which appears to have been developed further and is even more in line with the traditional socially driven news sites. You can see the hot stories (i.e. the ones that have been promoted to the site’s front-page), the recent stories (i.e. the ones still in the upcoming queue), a list of topics/categories along with the number of submissions or ‘blurbs’ in each, submit your own entry, or see a list of all the stories that you have submitted.Submitting a StoryThe one key difference between Technorati WTF and traditional socially driven news sites is that in Technorati’s case you aren’t actually submitting links to content, rather you write whatever content you want and submit it directly. When submitting, you are only asked for a topic, a title, and a description (which is where the content goes).Though you can type in a link within the description, there isn’t a specifically designated area for this. Lars Christian has an excellent guide on how to use Technorati WTF to drive traffic to your site. Once submitted, the content will immediately show up in the recent WTFs section where people can vote for it or share it with others via email.Moving on, the ‘Favorites’ tab on the main page simply takes you to a list of blogs that you have favorited and lists the most recent entry from each site. and the ‘Watchlist’ tab allows you to watch for certain keywords and have Technorati catalog the latest entries that match those keywords.Overall, I absolutely love the site’s new look and the steps they have taken to streamline it. They have gotten rid of all the superfluous information and have managed to display all the useful information in a very efficient and easy to absorb manner. To see the evolution of Technorati’s user interface, you might want to look at our coverage from July, 2006, February, 2007, and May, 2007.Thanks to Stan for the tip.**Note: I don’t use Technorati very extensively so please let it slide if I covered something that isn’t entirely new.

3 thoughts on “Technorati Redesigned – Get Realigned Here”

The tracker is awful, I hear you about the 1995 reference. Green on black, who the hell came up with that design. Surely they are not going to keep it.It’s all too much information for me, who are they aiming this at? Bloggers on crack?

Man, the designers at Technorati really need to sit back and contract this stuff out from now on, because the site keeps looking worse and further removed from the great original design that Derek Powazek put together.Most useless feature ever: their tagcloud has links that are all the same color and only separated by a few pixels in size, so everything is completely jammed together. Make the color change shades based on importance and make the popular links bigger than the unpopular ones by more than 1-2 pixels. I thought that stuff was common knowledge but I guess not.I hope Technorati runs out of money and dies soon, because these insane orange and green color schemes burn my retinas, and Google Blog Search is better anyway.

At least I can find my ping list again! For awhile it was no longer visible when you logged in and you had to go hunting for the ping list. I like to be able to see it with the list of blogs I own.Thanks for the in depth article on how it’s now set up – this will be a great reference for me and others!